REM

REM breaking up after 30 years feels to me like an old couple getting a divorce. Aftergoing through all the hard parts (Bill leaving the band, making albums without being in the studio together, not really talking to each other during the Around the Sun era), they suddenly get all chummy and happy again over the last three years. And now they break up? Why didn't you just split up after Reveal and spare us the last three albums? Now the kids are grown up and out of the house...BOOM! Your father and I are splitting up even though these last few years without you in the house are the best we've ever had. No, we will not be getting together with the family for festival season. In the winter of our lives, we will start new families across the country from each other, but we hope you still love us because we love you and we still love each other. A strange currency indeed.

I wore an REM hat every day junior year. Every five days I coupled it with my New Adventures in HiFi shirt. By the end of the year the shirt had pit stains and the black hat turned brown from the sun and dirt. I woke up for a month to How the West Was Won and Where It Got Us.

It was through REM that I learned about bands selling out from Jake Robertson. Apparently, they sold out when they signed with Warner Brothers before I even knew they existed. I had a hard time accepting that as it was all in the past for me and Green was my first REM album. I still don't understand how anyone can consider Green in its entirety as a sellout album. I can see maybe Stand as a sellout song and later Shiny Happy People.

I've never loved Out of Time. I don't know if I ever really loved an entire REM album front to back like I have a Radiohead or U2 album. No, that's no true, I loved Green fiercely. Even Automatic, I couldn't take Everybody Hurts and Man on the Moon soon bored me. But while their albums may have not been perfect, each album had perfect moments which is why I always returned to them. And they were usually just album tracks that killed me. Leave, Be Mine, Country Feedback, Sweetness Follows, Low, etc.

They always felt like a band that lived a double life. No ever played any of their early stuff in the radio like they did with U2 so when Eric Jacobson bought all of their early albums and played them for me, it rattled my bones. I was so used to the well-produced albums that I didn't know what to think. I felt old listening to Fables, like I was growing mold or moss on me as I listened. And that's why I love Fables more than any album save Green.

R.E.M.

I guess this day was destined to come, but, honestly, I'd never thought about it. For that reason, I was sincerely shocked to read the announcement that REM is over. After the initial shock wore off after seven or eight seconds, my next thought was, "I guess it's time." My next thought was, "I'm glad they put out Collapse Into Now as their last album." I enjoy that album, as a whole, more than anything else they put out over the last 15 years. I honestly like every song on the album. They're not all great, but I like them all. "Me, Marlon Brandon, Marlon Brando and I" is a great song that rings through my mind on a regular basis. And the closer, "Blue," while not 100% unique from their 1990's work, is pretty awesome.

I love and hate REM. They're hands down the most boring band I listen to. But they're also one of the most thrilling. I fully recognize that a lot of that thrill is nostalgic, but that's fine. The cliche rings true: they're the band I grew up with. I saw them live twice. Not many, but ok for living in Idaho/Utah. At the last concert of theirs I went to, I really appreciated how they seem to have given themselves over to their fans these last few years by saying things like, "This song belongs to you..." and then launching into "The One I Love" or "Losing My Religion." It was a stark comparison to the first time I saw them. Someone yelled, "Play 'Stand'!" and Stipe said, "We're not a jukebox." I would've liked to have seen them play "Swan Swan H" and "Find the River" live at some time in my life. "Beachball" is their worst song ever; one of the worst songs ever recorded by an American band.

Some Thoughts: An REM Retrospective From the Life of Joshua L. Sorensen, MLIS.

I never really loved Automatic like everyone else did/does. Granted there are some awesome songs there. But, as a whole, it's boring. In fact, the strongest feeling I got from Automatic came from seeing a poster of REM during the Automatic era hanging on the bedroom wall of a girl name Amber that I had a huge crush on. I thought, "Hey, I can love this album if it helps me get this girl." Of course, I never loved the album and I never got the girl.

Holy crap, "Beachball" sucks.

"Electrolite" is the far and away the one song my wife and I have listened to the most in our 14 years of being together. Far and away.

"What's the Frequency Kenneth?" is totally freakin awesome.

I once sat on the curb outside of a movie theater with a really pretty girl and told her, "When I hear 'Strange Currencies' it reminds me of you." It still reminds me of her, of course. After that incident, how could it not?

Like any true REM fan, I once had all the lyrics to "It's the End of the World..." memorized.

Whenever the song "Fretless" came on when my friends and I were hanging out I'd yell out the lyric, "She comes easy!" and it'd always get a laugh. Seriously, it'd always kill.

My t-shirt from the Monster tour--the green shirt with the black star on the front--was the only real world shirt I took with me on my mission. I vowed to wear it every single P day. I made it one year.

The one cover I have always wanted to hear from REM is U2's "Van Diemen's Land." I've always thought Stipe's voice would be perfect for singing, "A day will come in this dawning age when an honest man sees an honest wage."

While I think Reveal is their worst album, the song "I've Been High" is one of my favorite REM songs ever. In fact, when that album came out, that song sent me into a two week study of every REM album. That study lead me to the conclusion that the song "I've Been High" was the culmination of REM's entire career. I don't even know what that means. Upon coming to that conclusion, I proceeded to write REM a five page letter about it. I sent REM a hand written, five page letter explaining my theory about how the song "I've Been High" was the culmination of their career.

I played and sang "Let Me In" on an acoustic guitar for some close friends right after my mission. It was, perhaps, the last time I was cool. The "Strange Currencies" girl referenced above was in attendance.

I once listened to "Undertow" over and over on my car stereo while I changed a flat tire out in the freezing cold in Ephraim, Utah in January 2000.

I used to think the starting line of "The Wake-up Bomb" was "I look good in glasses," instead of "I look good in a glass pack." For six or seven years I'd sing, "I look good in glasses," every night when I took my contacts out and put my glasses on. When I found out what the real lyric was, I felt foolish.

During 7th grade I wrote out the lyrics of "Stand" from memory in math class, instead of paying attention to what problems my teacher was doing on the overhead projector.

The first tapes I ever bought, I got all at the same time one Saturday afternoon at the mall in Dallas, Texas. They were REM Green, U2 The Joshua Tree and...Bon Jovi Slippery When Wet. I still have the Green and Joshua tapes.

I wrote, "It's time I had some time alone" in giant letters on my bedroom wall when I was 17. How little I knew then.

This one makes me laugh now, but I once cried--literally shed tears--during "Half a World Away." I'd just left my girlfriend's house the night before I left on my mission. Though I loved her deeply, the tears weren't for her. Luckily, I can listen to that song today and not think of that incident.

My favorite REM song is "Country Feedback." When I saw REM in SLC in 1995, Stipe said, "This is Bill's and my favorite song" and then they played "Country Feedback" with the video from "Nightswimming" showing above and behind them. It totally lit me up. I thought, "My favorite REM song is Bill Berry's and Michael Stipe's favorite REM song. I totally get REM."

The 17 REM Songs That Made the Biggest Impact On My Life (In No Particular Order)

1. Nightswimming

2. Find the River

3. Exhuming McCarthy

4. It's the End of the World

5. King of Birds

6. Stand

7. Orange Crush

8. Swan Swan H

9. Superman

10. What's the Frequency, Kenneth?

11. Strange Currencies

12. Country Feedback

13. Belong

14. Low

15. Let Me In

16. Electrolite

17. Half a World Away

2 4 B+S

1. Listened to "Dirty Dream Number Two" again tonight. Went to YouTube and watched some live performances. It really changed my perception of them. Pretty cool, actually.

2. I absolutely cannot believe that "Dress Up In You" is not only NOT in the Top 10 B+S downloads on iTunes, it's not in the Top 20, 30, 40 or even 50. Kids, seriously, this is a phenomenal and a beautiful song. When I listen to it, I think, "Effortless." They make is sound so easy.

Great Lyric:

"Well it's high time we step outside

Drop the gloves and settle this like a man
Well we might stall and hem and haw
We might not fight but we won't walk away
No, we won't walk away."

Menomena, "Rotten Hell"

Is The Best Song of 2005...

The National's "Daughters of the Soho Riots"?


I think it may be.